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Meghan Cox Gurdon argues in the WSJ that modern fiction for teenagers is too dark. The argument runs that the consistently grim, even morbid, subjects in the genre have a harmful effect on their readers. Authors in that genre are, of course, upset by this article.

One thing that is strange about the WSJ article is that it interviews parents, writers, editors and booksellers, yet does not seem to interview any fiction-reading teenagers, whose opinions would seem to be highly relevant.

I’ve never liked the concept of deliberately writing a “fiction for teenagers” genre anyway. It seems to me people ought to try to write something good and not worry about who likes it. There’s too much of a “what shall we tell them to think?” vibe from the genre itself and articles like that above, in my opinion.

For what it’s worth, when I was a teenager, I don’t remember reading all that much teenage fiction, and what I did read wasn’t very good. I do remember I read a bunch of Thomas Hardy‘s novels. These had the advantages of being (a) recognized as great literature, (b) much better written than most modern stuff, whether for teenagers or anyone else, and (c) every bit as dark and depressing as the modern stuff. (For those of you unfamiliar with Hardy, his books are perhaps best described by this line from his own The Mayor of Casterbridge: “Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.”)

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“I was going to suggest to you that you serve your eggs with hollandaise sauce in hubcaps. Because there’s no plates like chrome for the hollandaise.”–Thus spoke Mitt Romney, in a terribly awkward move for a Presidential candidate, according to Dana Milbank of The Washington Post.

Well, if we can’t have presidential campaigns based upon anything substantive or important–and that ship sailed a long time ago–I suppose there are worse things than seeing who tells the best puns and shaggy dog stories.

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“What games conspicuously lack is moral consequence. Once you’ve killed someone, stolen something, or blown up a building, that’s usually the end of it – you’ll rarely get to see the emotional impact of your actions on the characters around you.”— Matthew Devereux. “The moral cost of video games”, The Christian Science Monitor January 7, 2008.

“Awaken.” –Kreia, to the Jedi Exile. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. 2004.

I know I have blogged about this game before, but I find I just cannot say enough about it. And whenever I start to despair of video games prospects as an art form, it cheers me up to think about it.

The greatest video game I have ever played is Obsidian Entertainment’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. Indeed, I consider it to be one of the finest artworks I have ever seen. It was playing this game which convinced me the medium was truly mature. (There were games made before it that rank as art, but playing it really brought it home to me.)

There are many things to recommend it: Firstly, the gameplay is quite varied and enjoyable in and of itself, and the graphics, while by no means stellar, especially today, convey subtle feelings quite powerfully, and are absolutely perfect for the story they tell. Finally, the music and sound is superb and the voice-acting is uniformly excellent—even “bit” characters perform wonderfully.

But, of course, what really matters to me is the writing; both the story and the dialogue. And KotOR II, you see, has the greatest writing of any video game I have ever played.

The story is brilliant—subtle, moving, suspenseful, funny and intriguing all at once. It effortlessly combines elements of adventure, mystery, comedy, romance, political thriller, horror and psychological drama into one perfectly paced narrative. The dialogue, too, is superbly done, containing layers of meaning and deep, philosophical underpinnings beneath its sharp, witty style.

But what is truly wonderful about KotOR II is its thematic coherence. Every character, every quest, everything in the game relates, in some way, to its overall thematic point. And it is always done cleverly and subtly—so much so that you will not realize it until you are familiar with the game’s theme. Every one of the game’s complex and rich characters serves to explore the key motif.

The obvious question is “what’s it about, then?”. It is hard to say, exactly. It touches on so many ideas about human nature, about politics, about psychology, about economics, about metaphysics that it is hard to answer concisely. The best I can say is that its theme is war, and its physical, political, psychological and spiritual consequences. But even that does not do it justice.

People may complain that its ending feels rushed and incoherent—and indeed it was rushed, but somehow, for me, it has never seemed incoherent. The coherence is what we see in the game; true, there is no total, demystifying explanation at the end, but if you really think about the message of the game, you will see that it has an awesome thematic coherence, the likes of which I have not seen in any other game, even Planescape: Torment. (Made, it must be pointed out, by many of the same people who made KotOR II)

In a recent interview with Iron Tower Studios, KotOR II’s lead designer, Chris Avellone, said the following regarding game design:

“You can pull a character through a story by having events unfold around them, or you can make it clear that events are happening because of what the player did – and *specifically* what the player did. Part of the fun of a world and a story is how your presence is causing changes in it, seeing those changes play out, and being made aware exactly how you caused those changes. Being an agent of change, the spark lighting the fuse, or the butterfly wings that spark the hurricane on the other side of the world is pretty gratifying.”

This seems to me to articulate perfectly what  KotOR II accomplished, and it is a mystery to me why it is not held up as a model of choice and consequences gameplay. Certainly, the story would be robbed considerably of its power were it told in a book or a film. That is perhaps its greatest achievement; that it is not merely a great story, but a great story specific to its medium.As I re-read what I have written here, I feel tempted to explain some part of the game, some character, some scene, shed some further light on its themes—but I cannot bring myself to spoil it any more than I may have already. It must be understood by the player, and to explain more would not convey the same feeling. It defies description.

The game is a masterwork, and in my opinion nothing has come close to it since. Knights of the Old Republic II is truly a superb game, and even if the video game industry never turns out anything close to as good as it again, it alone will have justified the medium’s rank as “Art”.

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Comedian Bill Maher said recently that he is “not one of those people who believes in American exceptionalism”. This has, of course, drawn the ire of the Conservatives, although the context of his statement shows him to actually be praising us relative to another country. (Afghanistan.)

Also, back in May, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post wrote an article called “The myth of American Exceptionalism“. The title alone is enough to upset Conservative writers, but he did not stop there:

“It turns out, however, that some of those most inclined to exalt American exceptionalism are simply using the imaginary past to defend their cultural tics — conventional marriage or school prayer or, for some odd reason, a furious antipathy to the notion that mankind has contributed (just a bit) to global warming… 

[American exceptionalism] discourages compromise, for what God has made exceptional, man must not alter. And yet clearly America must change fundamentally or continue to decline. It could begin by junking a phrase that reeks of arrogance and discourages compromise. American exceptionalism ought to be called American narcissism. We look perfect only to ourselves.” 

Mark Fitzgibbons, conservative writer for American Thinker, responded:

“Marriage, you see, is just a cultural tic to the Left.”

“What Cohen will never understand is that it is our system of freedom that makes us exceptional. It is freedom that allows us to maximize our potential, be peaceful yet respond quickly with strength to threats, to learn from failure, and succeed through personal responsibility, not because of the State. It is through freedom that individuals may reach their greatest potential, and that best benefits others. It is because of freedom that we are a prosperous and charitable people. “

The “American exceptionalism” debate is a fascinating one for so many reasons, but let me begin by saying that I take it from this that Fitzgibbons believes that “traditional” marriage ought to be defended, and that homosexual marriage should be forbidden. Odd, for someone who goes on to champion “freedom”.

It is interesting to see American exceptionalism justified on the grounds of freedom. We are very free indeed in America, but not so free (economically) as Hong Kong is, at least if you go by the Heritage Foundation’s measure. Socially speaking, many of the Scandinavian countries are a good deal more free than we are. (Incidentally, as Conservatives used to notice, Switzerland gives people much more freedom to keep and bear arms than we do.)

I do not intend to suggest that these places are better than the United States. But if we are better than them overall, it is not purely because of “freedom”. So, we might hypothesize that we are exceptional because we have found just the right mixture of freedom and restraint that is necessary to succeed. A pleasant, (perhaps slightly Panglossian) thought.

In any event, as I have remarked before, the definition of American exceptionalism is not clear. If it means that America is unique, well, that is certainly true. All countries are to some extent unique, due to geographical differences even if nothing else.

Moreover, America is a superpower, which is an even more exclusive club. But the Conservatives seem to me to insist on an even higher type of exceptionalism, one which seems to carry with it a certain hubris.

P.S. The title comes from a quote attributed to Otto von Bismarck: “The Americans have contrived to be surrounded on two sides by weak neighbors and on two sides by fish!”  There does not seem to be any source for this quote, so I doubt he really said it, but I think it is amusing nonetheless.

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When the wheels within wheels have all turned—
And the evidence cannot be found.
And nothing suspicious can be discerned—
Then conspiracies surely abound!

For it’s surely not any fallacy
That every documented event,
Can blamed on somebody’s malice be,

Rather than the incompetent. 


No particular reason for posting this. I was just  thinking about conspiracy theories for some reason, and that verse occurred to me. The idea was to poke fun at conspiracy theories, and how you can make anything into one, but I quickly got bogged down in syntax issues. 

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For reasons I explained here, I have enabled comment moderation on this blog.

There is, I admit, a good reason for suspicion of this practice. After all, if comments are subject to moderation, how is the reader to know that I am not censoring insightful and trenchant criticism of my posts? Answer: the reader cannot know.

So, I can understand if you feel suspicion of this new policy, but I can only give you my word that I shall not censor any comments solely on the grounds that they tear a point of mine to pieces.

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(Note: This post builds a bit more upon this post by P M Prescott. [Which links back to me, as it happens.]) 

Last week something of debate appeared in the pages of USA Today. A religion professor named Stephen Prothero argued that the “Objectivist” philosophy of Ayn Rand is incompatible with belief in the Christian religion. He is, in my view, correct; because Rand herself repeatedly stressed that this was the case, and moreover that one had to either accept her philosophy entirely or not at all. One could not believe some of John Galt’s teachings and some of Jesus Christ’s teachings, in other words.

But some people disagreed with this view, and wrote in to USA today to say so. You can read their dissensions here. Their general point is that you can in fact believe in both these things.

Quite apart from Rand’s own statements regarding this, I really do not see it. As a friend of mine pointed out to me: consider the Parable of the Prodigal Son, or the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. Both of these appear to be endorsing the idea of equal rewards for unequal work–sharing rewards based upon needs. Add to this the well-known statements made by Christ on the subject of the poor and Christianity and Objectivism look quite irreconcilable, in my opinion.

Prothero goes on to make the following remarkable statement: “In fact, [Objectivism] is farther from Christianity than the Marxism that Rand so abhorred.” Indeed. Rand herself called Christianity “the best kindergarten of communism possible.” (This reminds me of the conservative philosopher Oswald Spengler’s claim that “Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism.”)

Now, I am not one to make such bold assertions as those above. But I really, really do not understand how one can glean support for free market capitalism out of Christian teachings.

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According to this article by Peter Nowak, mainstream media outlets do not treat video games the same as they do television and film.

I can believe it, although I think it is changing now. I remember when Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 broke all kinds of sales records in its debut, one could see the press realizing this was a serious medium.

The bad thing is that the sorts of games that set these records are generally not the sort that show the medium at its artistic best. But it is a start.

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Just for the heck of it, I have temporarily enabled comment moderation, just in case that helps solve the problems with comments we have been experiencing lately. I doubt it will work, frankly, but it is worth trying. I am still researching possible causes of this problem.

To avoid creating many posts on this subject, I shall post all updates concerning this on this post.

UPDATE 1: And, as if by magic… success?
UPDATE 2: I am guardedly optimistic.